“I think most things are about ambiguity”
Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract painter. She burst forth on the art scene when she was featured in Life magazine article in 1952. She was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg whom she met at an opening in 1950. Greenberg was arguably the most influential critic in the world at the time. In 1958, she married Robert Motherwell, a well known Abstract Expressionist painter. She does not want to talk about feminism. She does not want to talk her past marriage or about contemporary painters. “There are three subjects I don’t like discussing: my former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries.” She wants to make beautiful paintings and throw beautiful parties. I appreciate the spontaneity of her work, the quickness, the application of paint, and the non-fussiness above the surface. I think I also like her cocky above-it-all portrait from her breakout Life article. The same thing that makes her paintings convincing I see in portraits of her. She is not asking for permission to be who she is and to create her way.
I have tried to curtail this case study to only be about Frankenthaler’s art, but art is influenced, and the way art is categorized is influenced by who you are. Some question whether Frankenthaler would have been as successful and remembered as big a painter if she had not been exposed and introduced to the art world through Clement Greenberg. Greenberg brought together many artists and publicized their working style. He showed the soak stain paintings to more artists. “When Greenberg brought the abstract painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, they seized upon both her technique and the broad, flat expanses of color she created.” Noland and Morris brought the soak stain method into their paintings. Frankenthaler and Greenberg traveled all over Europe looking at paintings and painting side by side. It is hard as a woman to feel like you are taken seriously or your work is taken seriously. Helen Frankenthaler was an attractive woman who made attractive paintings. Women and all artists have to think about how their art will be viewed. I am still of the age where I have a chip on my shoulder about being taken seriously as an artist because I am a woman. Make, make, make, marry, marry, marry... Will you make me? Will you marry me? It is not hard to have a chip on your shoulder “At a time when so many younger artists wouldn't be caught using a word like ''beauty'' - except sarcastically“ She was assured enough to partner with powerhouses and carry on her own work. She pioneered a new way of working. She is known as Helen Frankenthaler not so-and-so’s wife. So, note to self, knock that chip off honey!
Frankenthaler reacted to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by creating the soft glowing soak stain painting technique. A technique that allowed the surface and the paint to be really flat, quickly applied and open to happy accidents. I like to think that letting the material do part of the work is a material collaboration. She ushered abstract painting from abstract expressionism to color field painting. She refused to leave-out the reference to anything observable. “What concerns me when I work is not whether the picture is a landscape…or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” ''Women, as a rule, tend to tidy up pictures that don't need tidying up.” Her enduring question is, it seems: how can I bring the spontaneity of small works, the genuineness of immediate reactions of color, shape and placement, to a larger scale work? This is a question I come back to over and over. Artists I respect have said that my very small study paintings are more successful than the large paintings done after, but that was after seeing the large ones. I think large scale says, “look at me, everything in this painting is important.” That is how artists may look at their own small paintings and how others may view them after seeing larger ones but I do not know if they would have as much power without the big brother to compare to. Here is Frankenthaler on size, “Size and scope is necessary. You cannot accomplish on an easel size what the message is that you might be able to accomplish large scale.”
Photo by Gordon Parks for Life magazine 1952.
The bay 1963
My goal is not to work with color alone. I like the squishiness of paint. I like the hand of the artist visible in the application. I do like the spontaneity, quickness the non- fussiness, openness to interpretation and yes the beauty of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings. She talks about color only working in space, ''Color doesn't work unless it works in space,'' she says, launching one of her favorite subjects. ''Color alone is just decoration - you might as well be making a shower curtain.''
Explaining the artist/s approach.
Helen is educated and aware of art history. Her early Bennington College work referred to cubism. She created her own style in reaction to the abstract expressionists action paintings. The freedom from rendering of form and the dependence on a brush was established through her soak stain method. First she diluted the oil pigment with turpentine and poured onto unprimed canvas. This creeping flow of color and bloom of oil was at times manipulated with soft brushes to guide the flow but not to establish the initial shape. She has kept with the non-objective soak stain method for her entire career. She has switched from oil to acrylic and water on unprimed canvas. Frankenthaler was also a part of the printmaking renaissance of the early 1960’s. She created work at many print shops including, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island and Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.
Helen is educated and aware of art history. Her early Bennington College work referred to cubism. She created her own style in reaction to the abstract expressionists action paintings. The freedom from rendering of form and the dependence on a brush was established through her soak stain method. First she diluted the oil pigment with turpentine and poured onto unprimed canvas. This creeping flow of color and bloom of oil was at times manipulated with soft brushes to guide the flow but not to establish the initial shape. She has kept with the non-objective soak stain method for her entire career. She has switched from oil to acrylic and water on unprimed canvas. Frankenthaler was also a part of the printmaking renaissance of the early 1960’s. She created work at many print shops including, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island and Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.
Explaining the artist's intentions/ideas.
Frankenthaler was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg. She had to have been influenced by his writings and theories about painting. Greenberg, in short, stated that painting should use painting to understand the motivations and limits of painting. He introduced Frankenthaler to the galleries and artists who were the most influential during their marriage. They also toured France and Italy together looking at and discussing art. They painted together. Having a critic for a lover to constantly engage with art ideas had to have solidified her understanding of her own place in creating her own ideas. Art is often a solitary affair. Making art and being in a relationship with a critic may have been more like a polygamous affair.
Frankenthaler wants to make beautiful paintings. She spoke of beauty as the goal of her painting often. Wrestling with the formal ramifications of this quest sustained a very long and productive career. Her work suggests spaces: interiors sometimes, landscapes often. She makes small works on paper and heroically large works. She is interested in the materials. She has stripped down the elements of art to color, shape size and placement. “My pictures are full of climates,abstract climates, and not nature per se, but a feeling” This is enough to suggest many things but reveal little definite content over and above beauty and materiality.
Explaining the artist’s use of materials.
Explaining the artist’s use of materials.
Helen Frankenthaler is most known for her large-scale soak-stain paintings. November 1950, Greenberg escorted her to a show of Pollock's work at the Betty Parsons Gallery. ''It was original,'' she says of Pollock's work, ''and it was beautiful, and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in. I was in awe of it, and I wanted to get at why.''
Her reaction to the why was eventually to put an unprimed cloth with some charcoal sketches on it on the floor and poured diluted oil pigment into puddles. She said that she immediately saw a connection to the watercolors she had done plein air. Getting to the immediateness and the spontaneity of large gestures on large surfaces. The surfaces are flat the pigment is soaked into the fabric not sitting on top. Frankenthaler seems obsessed with flatness. Her most successful prints are lithographs, a planographic print. They look and feel very much like her paintings. The surface of lithographs do not have the plate marks or incised lines of intaglio prints. The colors created with touche on stone feel very much like watercolor. The drying of the oily ink creates tide lines. Touche made marks suggest the bloom of oil stains on paper or canvas as well.
Frankenthaler draws with color. Drawing to her is creating space not lassoing a shape. She is using line as a delineation of one thing next to another an edge that well placed creates shape.
In the 1980s she slowly started adding just a bit of thicker paint.
“To acknowledge an osmosis of the past and present around you and go naturally creatively free: Head heart and wrist; to be in control enough to not be in control at all. To have a dialogue with the work and to let yourself go in relation to it. Paintings don’t lie they have their beautiful working order just as nature itself has” “If you have a real sense of limits then you are free to break out of them.”
Explaining the artist’s process and key issues.
Frankenthaler works on the floor pouring liquid color then dragging with brooms, sponges, and fingers. Her issues are beauty and ambiguity. She is concerned with the placement of shapes, light, depth, beauty, color, form and perspective on a rectangular canvas. She balances the magic of direct experience with limits of educated experience. She works on the floor but thinks of paintings as rectangles on the wall. Once she sees the paintings on the wall then she cuts down the image to work as a painting. Everything in her life experience affects her art. “One IS one’s work and one’s work is one’s self.”
Some have criticised Frankenthaler for being formulaic and not pushing beyond a specific style. These same people may take issue with her talking about beauty in painting. They may not like the ambiguous content. They may not like her posh style and her upbringing. They may not like that she is unwilling to be a spokesperson for women. Helen Frankenthaler was a painter who painted, continued to paint and to deal with issues about the elements that create a beautiful painting with no apologies.
Helen Frankenthaler White Portal, 1967 Lithograph 30 x 22 inches Artist's proof.
References
Art 103 Gallery, “Art 103 Content 08 part 1 Fhas01 Helen Frankenthaler” film, Youtube video, 0:57-1:37 (August 30 2012).
Beyond Print: The Kenneth Tyler Collection, “Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Tyler: a 25 year collaboration” (February 21, 2012). Accessed Online
Ruth Fine, Helen Frankenthaler Prints. 1993 Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 11-29.
Gagosian and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, “NOW: HELEN FRANKENTHALER: Line into Color, Color into Line,” film [2016], Youtube video, (October 4, 2016).
Jon Mann, “How Helen Frankenthaler Pioneered a New Form of Abstract Expressionism.” Artsy Editorial (September 29, 2017). Accessed Online
Portland State University, “Helen Frankenthaler at Portland State: Q & A, 1972,” film [1972]. Youtube video, posted November 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00A1R06tLa8
Deborah Solomon, “Artful Survivor” New York Times Magazine, (May 14, 1989). Accessed Online
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